Visitor (7/13) by leiascully Email: leiascully@gmail.com Distribution: Ask, please Rating: T for non-explicit sexual situations and some swearing Categories: SRA Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance Spoilers: XF Revival speculation (spoilers through series and IWTB) Summary: Mulder tries to put his life back together after Scully leaves him. Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended. Author's Notes: I had to get all of my feelings out somehow. Stories from all fandoms are archived at http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully. + + + + 7 - Motion He gets up in the morning, tugs on shorts and a t-shirt, brushes his teeth, swallows his meds with a mouthful of coffee, and laces up his running shoes. He straps his phone to his arm but doesn't pick up his headphones. There's enough noise in his head without the clamor of classic rock for company. His body doesn't move the same way it did at thirty or even forty, but there is still a comfort in the firm, regular contact of his feet on the pavement or the dirt. It half-hypnotizes him. The world spools past; incognito in his sweaty gear, he slides through a crowd of tourists and barely provokes a flicker of interest. In a way he misses being on the lam. There was a purity to their existence after the trial. There was no pretense about them, no attempt at domestic bliss, no groceries to buy. They were Mulder and Scully, honed down to their essence, justified in their foxhole mentality. For years, they had lived perpendicular to ordinary lives, testing each step before they shifted their weight in case they were swallowed up. No one else had ever seemed to notice how treacherous the ground was. Then every new town might be a trap, every new face an enemy, and no one told them they were mistaken or paranoid. Each stop was a temporary shelter. They shrugged in and out of identities according to their soldiers' instincts. They pretended to be married or not as the whim took them, without discussing the idea for themselves. They changed the color of their hair and the timbre of their accents. He ran through deserts and forests, returning to that week's hotel room to shower. They'd kept their guns loaded and their bags packed. And the sex had been fantastic. He tried to redirect his thoughts; the shorts he ran in weren't confining enough. But after ten years of longing looks and breathless conversations and stolen moments, they had finally been able to enjoy their fill of each other. There had been desperate sex, and angry sex, and slow gentle tender sex. They had kissed their way up and down each other's bodies in hotels, motels, tents, and cars. They had laughed in each other's arms. They had wept. They had surprised each other, somehow, even after years. On the road, they hadn't had to hide any part of themselves from each other. He'd known what brand of tampons she used and how often she'd need to restock. He'd known the way it sounded when she spit in the sink after brushing her teeth. He'd known what foods would upset her stomach, and what she looked like in jeans and a t-shirt, standing in the fluorescent glare of the laundromat, waiting for their clothes to dry. Her hair had always smelled like fabric softener afterward. He'd buried his face in it and breathed her in. He reaches the halfway point of his usual route and doesn't turn back. His mind is too cluttered to head home yet. He has lived a life that necessitated forward momentum: he had to get out of his house, he had to chase the truth, he had to flee the consequences, he had to avert the armageddon. Scully's a physicist; she understands that his body at rest will never stay at rest, in contradiction to the rest of the universe. "You're a perpetual motion machine," she'd said once, exasperated. He'd turned it into an innuendo. She'd quirked a wry eyebrow and let him put his hand up her shirt. They'd fallen onto the bed together, leaving the fight for another day. And then one day there were too many accumulated fights, and neither of them could open their mouths without a stale unspoken word falling out. He'd coaxed her to run with him. They'd outpaced their frustration, sweated out their anger. They'd passed a water bottle from hand to hand and said nothing. She'd reached out and steadied herself against his shoulder as she stretched, and he had turned to kiss her fingers, licking the salt of her sweat off his lips. "We can't do this forever," she'd said in the shower as he lifted the weight of her hair off her shoulders to soap her back. "I know," he'd said. "I can't do this forever," she'd clarified, her voice sounding odd in the cramped space. "I know," he'd said. They'd started looking for houses the next day. The one they settled on was unremarkable, but there had been enough of the blood money he'd had left to buy it and furnish it. He had teased her once about picking out china patterns, but their taste in decor was only moderately compatible. Mulder tended toward stern antiques; Scully liked overstuffed sofas. But they'd been happy there, after a fashion, for a while. It had felt more like a home than anywhere he'd lived since Samantha. He'd dreamed once that he and William were playing catch in the yard on a summer night while Scully looked on and teased him about the night he'd taught her to swing a bat. He has some of that furniture now. He still sleeps in their bed and eats at their table, now that neither of them are heaped with cuttings and books. Those were the things he understood made a home, and so he'd packed them into a truck as some kind of shorthand when they'd gotten the new place for their prodigal return. They left most of the rest of it behind when they sold the unremarkable house, called it semi-furnished, ditched the fridge and the rest of the appliances. They'd built a fire in the driveway using most of his newspaper clippings for kindling on their last night in Goochland County. She'd sat between his knees on the porch steps and leaned back against him and they'd drunk wine and he'd felt no fear at all, watching the flames lick at the lowering sky. It had been perfect, in that bittersweet way that has characterized most of his existence since adolescence. They had made a light that drove away the darkness and left them a radius of peace, though the coyotes still yipped in the woods. Fires burn out, eventually, and the dark closes in. He can only hope there is still some ember in the ashes that can be revived. If anyone has the power to breathe life back into something, it's probably Scully. He is soaked with sweat. He drops to a walk and pulls up the tail of his shirt to wipe his face. He'll feel this tomorrow, he knows, but sometimes it's necessary. He needed to think about the way she told him to go, but wanted him to stay, and the way he went, only half-unwilling. He ought to have known better at the time; he doubts she will ever tell him she needs him, no matter how many times she says she loves him. But there were no good choices, no right choices, and they both know it now the way they knew it then. If the path at their feet has ever been illuminated, it has only been by the flashlights they carried. The shadows shift and loom even in hindsight. This is the reason Scully goes to confession, he thinks, to feel the sting of his sins scrubbed away first and the aching emptiness later where he held his secrets close to his heart. A breeze pushes his hair back and kisses his forehead. He walks for a moment to catch his breath and stretch, and then picks up the pace, turning toward home. His mind turns over as smoothly as his feet. The weight that held him down for so long feels like a dim memory. He can bear it now. He has the strength to stand on his own two feet, not propped up by Scully or his work or his accumulated misery. Let there be light. He knows that he and Scully have not righted the wrongs they have done each other, but the air feels clearer without the fog of things unsaid. Sometimes the act of saying a thing allows it to be real, allows it to be felt. He needed that as much as any other intervention, medical or emotional. His memory, once so reliable, has been tampered with over the years, but he always trusts Scully's vision of the world, and in her eyes, they have redeemed each other in some small measure. He breathes easier now. When he gets home, there's a message from Skinner. He didn't even feel the phone buzz. "Agent Mulder," Skinner says in his gruff way, slightly tinny from the way Mulder's holding the phone away from his sweaty ear, "I'd like to see you in my office tomorrow morning. 9 sharp. Don't be late, agent." + + + + Feedback is welcome at leiascully@gmail.com. Stories from all fandoms are archived at http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully.